skud

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Over in the comments of the Dreamwidth mirror of my previous post, Elf asked whether I could redraw the graph of the ebooks discussions after removing her linkspam from the mix. Good idea!

In the end I removed several things:

• Elf’s linkspam (elf1)
• Kanata’s linkspam (kanata)
• The entire tech-blog cluster (oreilly1, booksprung1, and those linked to them)
• Any posts that linked to mitchell but weren’t otherwise connected to the graph
• Any posts which, after all that was done, were orphaned, not linking to anything else

The results were interesting:

ebooks discussion (no linkspam version) - full size SVG, PNG

So, to reiterate, this is the “interesting bits” version of the LiveJournal/Dreamwidth discussion that took up most of the previous graph. I’ve also added something new to the visualisation: posts shown as ellipses happened on LJ/DW, and those in rectangles happened on non-LJ/DW blogs. This makes it easy to see which parts of the conversation were happening where. As I did last time, any post that was crossposted to at least one of LJ or DW counted as an LJ/DW post.

Points of interest:

• In the lower left, there’s a cluster of mostly authors or others involved in the publishing industry, many of them posting on non-LJ/DW blogs.
• The centre of the graph, especially those posts linking to troisroyaumes and colorblue1, are what I would characterise as members of the social justice/fandom community.
• At the upper right, also linking to some posts shown in the lower right, you can see that there were a handful of men mostly linking to other men (jimhines et al.)

We already knew that the tech blogs were having their own discussion unconnected to the LJ/DW discussion, but now we can see that the authors/publishers were, for the most part, having a conversation disconnected from the fans. The crossover between the author and fan conversations mostly happened via Karen Healey, a young author whose first YA novel was published last year, and who moves in both circles.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the different conversations going on, and see how the actual content of them differed. Here are Wordle diagrams of the three main clusters:

Authors wordle (based on: renesears1, mitchell, healey1, jimhines1, sjaejones, pauley1, seawasp)

Social justice/fandom wordle (based on: qian1, deepad, colorblue, starlady, marina1, marina2, wistfuljane)

Tech blog wordle (based on: oreilly1, booksprung2, oleary, librarything, booki.sh, shatzkin2, wired)

It’s no real surprise to find that each of these groups was writing about different stuff, but I still find it interesting to see the words that pop out in each picture: “publishers” and “illegal” in the author wordle; “people”, “Western”, and “indigenous” in the social justice one; “piracy” and “DRM” among the tech bloggers.

Again, for reference, links to all the blog posts referenced can be found in this spreadsheet.

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

I’ve been having this conversation a bit lately so I just wanted to put it out there.

From 1998-2007 I worked full time in open source software. I considered myself a member of the open source community. Open source was kind of my “thing”.

This is no longer true.

I still use open source software extensively (I’m writing this in WordPress, using Mozilla on Gnome on Ubuntu), but then, so does everyone, whether they know it or not. Sometime around the early 2000s, Linux and other open source software stopped being a fringe, weirdo thing and started just being a sensible choice for most Internet projects. And since almost everything’s on the Internet these days, well, open source is just something that is.

To put it another way: if the open source movement were a software project, I’d say that software project is in maintenance mode. It’s out there, it has widespread adoption, and while there’s still work to be done, it’s more the ongoing work of keeping things going than the initial big push to get it launched. And I’m not much good at maintenance projects.

So what am I doing these days? When people ask me I usually say, “Open… stuff.” And then I wave my hands a bit. In my day job with Freebase I mostly work with open data. But I’m also interested in those sort of open principles as they’re applied to other aspects of our lives.

A short list of things I consider to fall under the umbrella of “open stuff”:

• Intellectual property reform and alternatives to the current copyright system (eg. Creative Commons, anti-DMCA efforts, etc.)
• Increased access to knowledge, information, and art (Wikipedia, open access journals, Scarleteen)
• Decentralised social networking platforms (StatusNet, Diaspora)
• Radical online collaboration and novel ways for groups to work together online (Wikipedia, of course, but also Anonymous, which I think is fascinating and important even if I mostly disagree with them)
• Using technology to connect and empower members of marginalised groups (Genderplayful Marketplace, disability hacking)
• Using the Internet for social change and grassroots political activism (too many to list, but #jan25 seems timely)
• Non-traditional, non-hierarchical ways of working on projects (Agile, consensus-driven, anarchic)
• Grass-roots, community-run, egalitarian events (unconferences and the like)
• Unofficial/unlicensed fan activities, especially creative/critical/transformative fanworks and the communities around them (Organization for Transformative Works, vidding, scanlation)
• Small-business and micro-entrepreneurial activities on the Internet, especially as they enable independent artists/writers/musicians/creators (Etsy, Kickstarter, Bandcamp)

There’s more, of course, but all those are things that excite me. It feels like there’s something broader there — not just software, but a whole cluster of Internet-related things that are about giving people more options, more ways to express themselves, more ways to make a difference, more ways to (at the risk of sounding a bit woo-woo) realise their potential. Ideally while not being beholden to, or at the risk of being shut down by, any one corporation or government or institution.

Of course open source software is a part of this, but I don’t think it’s the only part, and it’s definitely not the leading or most important part for me any more. So, if you invite me to speak or write or come to an open source event or whatever, and I say “I don’t really work in open source any more,” this is what I’m talking about. Hope that makes sense.

(That said, if you read this and you’d still like me to speak/write/attend your open source thing and talk about “open stuff” in a more general sense, let me know.)

Random pic is random: Dolores Park mural, at the corner of 18th and Guerrero, San Francisco. In the style of Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.